gao report news from FierceHealthIT

A new Government Accountability Office report has underscored a problem already quite familiar to FierceHealthIT readers--that pulling together care quality data is a heck of a problem. The recently-released GAO report reviewed eight hospitals' efforts to collect data on measures specified by CMS. (These are the data sets CMS requires hospitals to submit if they want Medicare payment increases.) The case studies concluded that while existing IT systems play a role, they …

Not only have federal health IT efforts left major holes in security and privacy policy, it's going to be difficult and expensive to fix the problem, too, according to a new GAO report. The watchdog organization would like to see HHS establish rules and project milestones which make sure that the exchange of digital health information between providers nationwide is secure and protects patient privacy. These rules should take into account individual state laws and specify the amount of …

A new study by the Government Accountability Office has concluded that the systems used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to send and receive bills and communicate with providers are riddled with at least 47 security holes. According to the GAO, the CMS network hasn't implemented sufficiently secure user identification and authentication, user authorization, system boundary protection, cryptography, and auditing and security event monitoring. CMS also failed to make …